Quilting ... Of Course

rated by 0 users

This post has
11
Replies |
3
Followers

My name is Pamela ... you can call me Pam if you'd like. Hope you all are doing great!!

I am new to quilting. I have a couple of ladies who started to teach me techniques and basics of quilting. Summer is here and I'm home with my kids, so haven't had a chance to spend much time with them.

I'm hoping you can help me answer this question to ease my mind. My friend has a beautiful long arm that she does her quilting on. I'd love one, but budget just doesn't afford one, and at this time, neither does space. Have any of you used your sewing machines to do quilting with and if so, can I ask how? I've seen some frames in the fons and porter magazine that looks like you can use them with your sewing machine and was also wondering if anyone out here is familiar with these frames or have used one.

Welcome Pam! I hope you enjoy your time here with us! There have been many discussion about quilting on a domestic sewing machine (DSM). If you go to the Forums home page, over to the right you'll see Tags. Click on the "machine quilting" tag. That will take you to links of previous discussions on this topic. You could use the search function, too, as some of our older discussions might not have been tagged.

On the banks of the Mississippi River in north central Minnesota (Brainerd lakes area)

hi pam and welcome, i've only done a couple of queen sized qilts on my domestic machine, mostly i do smaller ones and send out the huge quilts. it involves a lot of rolling and stuffing, so they need to be well basted. i have practice squares about 2 feet square (i use scraps of fabric and batt) i use them for new designs and everytime i start quilting a project, i quilt on the practice scrap for a few minutes to loosen up. you can go over and over the practice squares. gini

Welcome to the group. This is a great group of friendly and helpful people. We do get some quilts made and lots of fun, too.

If you go under Groups on the bar on the home page, look for Jodie's BOM. Go in to Discussions and there were a lot of discussions about quilt as you go and sew and flip method. You quilt the top in smaller sections so you don't have the heavy bulk of top, batting and backing going through the neck of the machine. I've been doing it on this project and really like it. I will probably do all my quilting this way now because I don't have a long arm either. No budget and no space.

It is possible to quilt on a home sewing machine but it does require a lot of effort in constantly manipulating the quilt around. In free motion quilting You are also limited, by the space you have from throat to needle and scrunched up quilt. My machine has a 7 1/2 inch throat and the quilt took fifty hours to fully stipple. It's in my blog, which you can see by clicking on my name and going to my blog. This is true for anyone's blog. They have several varieties of machines out there that have 11 to 12 inch throat space that are also home sewing machines that could be used on a frame as well. Good luck to you and welcome to QCA

I'm so excited to have joined Fons and Porters Website and Magazine. I'm REALLY EXCITED to have joined QCA. This site has been SO HELPFUL to me. Just reading through some of the posts has answered SO MANY questions and has helped give me the motivation to keep quilting. Everyone seems so nice too.

This fall I'm going to a quilt camp, with women who've been quilting for a LONG TIME and I have a VERY LONG ways to go to know what they do. They are teaching me the techniques of quilting, but I don't see them most of the summer (they probably need the break from me ... LOL ... with so many questions and all). So QCA has been a God send for me.

Thanks for the info about Jodie's BOM. It sounds like EXACTLY what I'm looking for.